Tuesday, January 13, 2015

Customer-Driven Transformation via Walking in Customers’ Shoes

There is an old saying: "You can't really understand another person's experience until you've walked a mile in his shoes.”

This statement is really the foundation for designing a great customer
experience! There is no customer-driven transformation (and it must be
customer-driven) without really understanding your customers and what
they go through when interacting with your organization.

What does that mean? It means that, if companies are to design and
deliver a great customer experience, they must first know who their
customers are, what customers are trying to do with their products or
services, what they are going through in order to achieve that, and how
the experience went.

So, let’s start with first things first…

Who are your customers?
Many companies talk about developing products and designing experiences
for their “target customers,” but what can you really do with knowing
that your customers are “males, 18-49?” Targets are too high-level and
meaningless when it comes to customer experience innovation and design;
they don’t provide details about needs, goals, attitudes, behaviors, or
emotions, and are just too far from reality and from what the customer
is actually doing.

Personas, on the other hand, are up close and personal – literally.
Personas are fictional characters used to describe an ideal prospect or
an actual customer going through some scenario with your company. They
outline motivations, goals, behaviors, challenges, likes, dislikes,
objections, and interests that drive buying decisions or whatever it is
that your persona is trying to achieve.

Using personas to define your customers allows you to shift from
target-thinking to a more actionable definition or view. If you really
want to develop a personalized experience for your customers, you need
to do your homework and develop personas. Personas take you one step
closer to a customer-driven transformation.

Once we know who the customer is - whose journey we are going to focus
on - we can take the next step: map the customer journey with the
organization. We need to focus on mapping very specific jobs to be
achieved by the customer. You’ll find out very quickly that it’s going
to be much easier and much more meaningful to map at the persona level than
for some high-level, meaningless, inactionable target demographic.

There are many approaches to mapping – outlining an approach is a blog
post on its own. Don’t get so lost in the HOW that you forget the WHY.

Why should we map?
If there’s going to be any customer-driven transformation, we need to
think about the journey, not just about individual, singular
touchpoints. Customers just don’t think about things that way – they
think about your company and your brand overall. When your product
quality stinks, you stink. When your service is bad, you are bad. As a
result, you need to take a more holistic view of the experience.
Remember, you’re only as strong as your weakest link. So, understand
your individual touchpoints, but think in terms of journeys. Also know
that much of the experience often happens between the touchpoints, i.e.,
those things that happen behind the scenes as well as those that are
out of the control of the customer and the company, like economic or
political factors, traffic on the way to the store, or the lack of
parking spaces – which are difficult for organizations to measure
directly.

McKinsey found
that organizations that focus on the entire experience (rather than
just managing individual touchpoints) benefit through enhanced customer
satisfaction, reduced churn, increased revenue, and greater employee
satisfaction. These organizations have broken down the proverbial silos
and found effective ways to collaborate across departments, another
benefit of taking a more holistic view/approach.

Transformational thinking
The great thing about journey maps is that you’re going to use them to
not only transform the customer experience but also to transform
organizational thinking – in order to transform the customer experience.

How?

Let’s start with one of the most important things: maps help to ensure
that the entire organization is on board with the common goal, improving
the customer experience.

One approach to achieve that is to use maps for employee onboarding and
continuous training. Maps help the employee connect the dots and make
sense of how cross-functional teams work together to deliver the
customer experience, and they provide a clear picture of how what the
employee does contributes to that experience. Maps help them understand
how their work matters.

Maps provide employees with a clear line of sight. When employees have a clear line of sight, it means that they...

know how they contribute to the common goal (this is especially
important for back-office employees who often feel like they cannot
impact the customer experience)

know what it means to deliver a great customer experience, and ultimately

are given the tools and training - and are empowered - to do so

“Customer empathy” is the latest buzz phrase, but it’s not just a buzz
phrase, it’s a reality and a necessity. It’s all about understanding and
sharing the needs and feelings of others. To walk in another's shoes is
to understand and live what they are doing, thinking, and feeling;
these details are all part of the journey mapping process. When
employees are able to empathize, they can deliver a great customer
experience for every customer with which they interact.

And finally, we all know how detrimental silos can be not only to the
customer experience but also to an organization. When the organization
is siloed, information is not shared, the cross/multi/ omnichannel
experience is a mess, and the organization as a whole is not really
focused on the end game. Cross-functional involvement is needed to build
the maps and to ensure ownership of the touchpoints; as such, they
become that tool to help break down the silos. Breaking down silos means
that data and information flow freely across the organization, without
any barriers. When those silos exist, a customer’s end-to-end
experiences with the organization are fragmented and painful.

As you can see, maps are quite valuable and not only transform the
organization but also your culture, the way you do business, and
ultimately, the customer experience.

Empathy depends not only on one's ability to identify someone else's emotions but also on one's capacity to put oneself in the other person's place and to experience an appropriate emotional response. -Charles G. Morris

About CX Journey Inc.

CX Journey Inc. is a consulting firm specializing in laying the groundwork required to establish a CX strategy that will drive your culture transformation efforts. Our beliefs are that (1) customer understanding along the customer experience journey is key to developing a strategy that allows both customers and businesses to achieve their desired outcomes, and (2) the employee experience cannot be an afterthought.

Why CX Journey™?

You know the quote, "Success is a journey, not a destination." Well, the customer experience is a journey, too. It's a never-ending journey. Once you've designed the best experience for customers today, their needs change, their expectations evolve, customers change, etc. You'll need to think about the experience today and listen for - and anticipate - what lies ahead. You must always strive to deliver that ultimate customer experience, not only at a single touchpoint but also - especially - along the entire journey. Have you taken the first step?

"Knowing where you're going is the first step to get there." -Ken Blanchard

"It is good to have an end to journey toward, but it is the journey that matters in the end." - Hemingway